Aeroviews Blog

Drones in the skies

We pride ourselves in being able to offer fantastic uncompressed video in RAW format with our DJI MFT X5R camera with the choice of various Olympus lenses.

Equipment

The DJI Inspire 1 was a great innovation and a game changer when it initially surfaced from DJI's event in San Francisco on November 12th 2014. It was the world's first flying 4K camera that offers midair transformation as well as a built-in wireless HD video transmitter, stabilization indoors without GPS, and more camera control than ever. At the time the then Director of Aerial Imaging Eric Cheng said “The Inspire 1 is truly a first-of-its-kind product that we see easily fitting into the toolbox of professionals across a variety of industries while still being to capture outstanding images for creative and hobby use.” Since then the Inspire 1 has had many improvements and additional cameras added to its toolbox. The X5 micro four thirds camera being one of them, soon followed by its professional uncompressed RAW version the X5R.

The DJI X5R gives us raw format, a fantastic video format that allows us to edit and grade video as we would a RAW photographs. Together with after effects and premiere we are able to work with ProRes 444 video maintaining as much detail as possible.

Workflow

Firstly we use the DJI program called Cinelight to connect our DJI SSD cards used to record the footage to our Mac Pro workstations. This records in RAW uncompressed format. We then export the footage required.

We then create a new project in After Effects maintaining 16 bit per channel and import as a DNG sequence. We have now fantastic Raw video sequence which can have all the colour grading and lighting required, bring out the darks and push back the highlights just as we do in Lightroom with our drone photography.

Once we are happy with the grading we create a composition which we export via the media encoder, DNxHR RGB 444 10 bit ProRes 4K format, this maintains all the quality but uses less hard drive than the initial files. This can be then imported into premiere for video edition.

Delivery of Video Production

On completion of all our projects imagery is sent to our clients via wetransfer.

All commercial drone pilots/companies must hold a current permission/certification issued by the Civil Aviation Authority, otherwise known as the CAA. Our CAA ID is 1142. No online registers of drone operators has any CAA approval. As such, we are not involved in any such registers.

We are insured by Coverdrone, a comprehensive aviation insurance product for the commercial drone industry and is fully compliant with EU regulation EC785/2004.